In order to solve the problem of feature extraction of underwater acoustic signals in complex ocean environment, a new method for feature extraction from ship-radiated noise is presented based on empirical mode decomposition theory and permutation entropy. It analyzes the separability for permutation entropies of the intrinsic mode functions of three types of ship-radiated noise signals, and discusses the permutation entropy of the intrinsic mode function with the highest energy. In this study, ship-radiated noise signals measured from three types of ships are decomposed into a set of intrinsic mode functions with empirical mode decomposition method. Then, the permutation entropies of all intrinsic mode functions are calculated with appropriate parameters. The permutation entropies are obviously different in the intrinsic mode functions with the highest energy, thus, the permutation entropy of the intrinsic mode function with the highest energy is regarded as a new characteristic parameter to extract the feature of ship-radiated noise. After that, the characteristic parameters—namely, the energy difference between high and low frequency, permutation entropy, and multi-scale permutation entropy—are compared with the permutation entropy of the intrinsic mode function with the highest energy. It is discovered that the four characteristic parameters are at the same level for similar ships, however, there are differences in the parameters for different types of ships. The results demonstrate that the permutation entropy of the intrinsic mode function with the highest energy is better in separability as the characteristic parameter than the other three parameters by comparing their fluctuation ranges and the average values of the four characteristic parameters. Hence, the feature of ship-radiated noise can be extracted efficiently with the method.

Extracting useful features from ship-radiated noise can improve the performance of passive sonar. The entropy feature is an important supplement to existing technologies for ship classification. However, the existing entropy feature extraction methods for ship-radiated noise are less reliable under noisy conditions because they lack noise reduction procedures or are single-scale based. In order to simultaneously solve these problems, a new feature extraction method is proposed based on improved complementary ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise (ICEEMDAN), normalized mutual information (norMI), and multiscale improved permutation entropy (MIPE). Firstly, the ICEEMDAN is utilized to obtain a group of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) from ship-radiated noise. The noise reduction process is then conducted by identifying and eliminating the noise IMFs. Next, the norMI and MIPE of the signal-dominant IMFs are calculated, respectively; and the norMI is used to weigh the corresponding MIPE result. The multi-scale entropy feature is finally defined as the sum of the weighted MIPE results. Experimental results show that the recognition rate of the proposed method achieves 90.67% and 83%, respectively, under noise free and 5 dB conditions, which is much higher than existing entropy feature extraction algorithms. Hence, the proposed method is more reliable and suitable for feature extraction of ship-radiated noise in practice.

The classification performance of passive sonar can be improved by extracting the features of ship-radiated noise. Traditional feature extraction methods neglect the nonlinear features in ship-radiated noise, such as entropy. The multiscale sample entropy (MSE) algorithm has been widely used for quantifying the entropy of a signal, but there are still some limitations. To remedy this, the hierarchical cosine similarity entropy (HCSE) is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the hierarchical decomposition is utilized to decompose a time series into some subsequences. Then, the sample entropy (SE) is modified by utilizing Shannon entropy rather than conditional entropy and employing angular distance instead of Chebyshev distance. Finally, the complexity of each subsequence is quantified by the modified SE. Simulation results show that the HCSE method overcomes some limitations in MSE. For example, undefined entropy is not likely to occur in HCSE, and it is more suitable for short time series. Compared with MSE, the experimental results illustrate that the classification accuracy of real ship-radiated noise is significantly improved from 75% to 95.63% by using HCSE. Consequently, the proposed HCSE can be applied in practical applications.

In order to solve the problem of feature extraction of underwater acoustic signals in complex ocean environment, a new method for feature extraction from ship radiated noise is presented based on empirical mode decomposition theory and permutation entropy. It analyzes the separability for permutation entropies of the intrinsic mode functions of three types of ship radiated noise signals, and discusses the permutation entropy of the intrinsic mode function with the highest energy. In this study, ship radiated noise signals measured from three types of ships are decomposed into a set of intrinsic mode functions with empirical mode decomposition method. Then, the permutation entropies of all intrinsic mode functions are calculated with appropriate parameters. The permutation entropies are obviously different in the intrinsic mode functions with the highest energy, thus, the permutation entropy of the intrinsic mode function with the highest energy is regarded as a new characteristic parameter to extract the feature of ship radiated noise. After that, the characteristic parameters, namely, the energy difference between high and low frequency, permutation entropy, and multi-scale permutation entropy, are compared with the permutation entropy of the intrinsic mode function with the highest energy. It is discovered that the four characteristic parameters are at the same level for similar ships, however, there are differences in the parameters for different types of ships. The results demonstrate that the permutation entropy of the intrinsic mode function with the highest energy is better in separability as the characteristic parameter than the other three parameters by comparing their fluctuation ranges and the average values of the four characteristic parameters. Hence, the feature of ship radiated noise can be extracted efficiently with the method.

Object detection in underwater environments presents significant challenges due to the inherent limitations of sonar imaging, such as noise, low resolution, lack of texture, and color information. This paper introduces AquaYOLO, an enhanced YOLOv8 version specifically designed to improve object detection accuracy in underwater sonar images. AquaYOLO replaces traditional convolutional layers with a residual block in the backbone network to enhance feature extraction. In addition, we introduce Dynamic Selection Aggregation Module (DSAM) and Context-Aware Feature Selection (CAFS) in the neck network. These modifications allow AquaYOLO to capture intricate details better and reduce feature redundancy, leading to improved performance in underwater object detection tasks. The model is evaluated on two standard underwater sonar datasets, UATD and Marine Debris, demonstrating superior accuracy and robustness compared to baseline models.

Extracting effective features from ship-radiated noise is an important way to improve the detection and recognition performance of passive sonar. Complexity features of ship-radiated noise have attracted increasing amounts of attention. However, the traditional definition of complexity based on entropy (information stored in the system) is not accurate. To this end, a new statistical complexity measure is proposed in this paper based on spectrum entropy and disequilibrium. Since the spectrum features are unique to the class of the ship, our method can distinguish different ships according to their location in the two-dimensional plane composed of complexity and spectrum entropy (CSEP). To weaken the influence of ocean ambient noise, the intrinsic time-scale decomposition (ITD) is applied to preprocess the data in this study. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated through a classification experiment of four types of marine vessels. The recognition rate of the ITD-CSEP methodology achieved 94%, which is much higher than that of traditional feature extraction methods. Moreover, the ITD-CSEP is fast and parameter free. Hence, the method can be applied in the real time processing practical applications.